Kenny Shopsin, Brash Owner of a Quirky Restaurant, Dies at 76

NEW YORK — Kenny Shopsin, the colorful proprietor of a fabled Manhattan restaurant where the menu is vast and the customer has never been king, died Sunday at his home in the West Village. He was 76.

His son-in-law Andrew Lampert said he had fallen last year and had had a series of health problems since.

Shopsin and his wife, Eve, started their restaurant, Shopsin’s General Store, in 1983 in a grocery they had been running on Bedford Street in the West Village. It has moved several times since and is now on the Lower East Side, but wherever it has been it has reflected the curmudgeonly, curse-word-employing personality of Shopsin, a man who was rarely written about without having the word “eccentric” appended to his name.

Not that he was written about that often. Shopsin didn’t like publicity or being listed in diners guides because, he said, such attention had the annoying effect of attracting customers. His was a classic neighborhood restaurant, and he didn’t want it to become a tourist attraction. He was not averse to throwing someone out who didn’t seem to get the chatty, casual-clutter look and feel of the place.

“By kicking them out, what I’m doing is respecting the fact that they don’t belong here,” he explained in “Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin,” a book he wrote (with Carolynn Carreño) in 2008 — with some reluctance, he said, because it had the potential to attract more of these very types of customers.

He used the restaurant’s formidable menu — often described as containing 900 selections at its most expansive point — as a sort of crowd-control weapon.

“I hang a menu out in front of the restaurant, which a lot of places do in the hope of enticing customers to come inside by showing them what they have to offer,” he wrote. “I do it for the opposite reason. I put the menu there to dissuade people from coming in. My menu is six pages long, and there is a lot of stuff crammed on those pages.”

The stuff includes Mac’n’Cheese Pancakes, a fry-pan hodgepodge called Blisters on My Sisters, egg plates with names like Krakatoa and Leeky Boat, and lots and lots of soups and sandwiches.

“People who aren’t familiar with a restaurant look at a menu in order to conceptualize a place,” Shopsin added in the book, “and when they look at my menu the only conception they have is that it’s out of their conception.”

Kenneth Henry Shopsin was born on May 19, 1942, in the Bronx. His father, Morris, owned a paper manufacturing company, and his mother, Dorothy (Serating) Shopsin, was a homemaker.

He grew up in the Bronx until about the age of 10, when his family moved to White Plains. He graduated from White Plains High School in 1958 and attended the University of Vermont for a time but did not obtain a degree.

He had an assortment of jobs before he married Eve Bidnick in 1971, and about the same time they acquired a grocery store on the corner of Bedford and Morton streets with financial help from Shopsin’s father.

“There was a grocery store on each end of Morton Street,” where he lived, Shopsin wrote in his book, “and I decided I wanted to buy one or the other. I had no relationship with food as a prospective vendor or producer of it. My only relationship with food up to that point had to do with being a compulsive eater.”

The store kept him busy.

“From the time I opened at seven in the morning until I closed at eight o’clock at night, I was moving: helping customers, taking things off shelves, adding things up,” he wrote. “I didn’t have an adding machine, so I would take the bag I was packing the groceries in and the pencil stuck behind my ear and I’d write the order up on the bag. When customers left, the bag was their receipt.”

The new grocers soon found that some customers wanted sandwiches to go, and they began providing them — chicken salad, egg salad. “Essentially, if anyone asked me what I did for a living, I said I sold mayonnaise — mayonnaise with chicken, mayonnaise with shrimp, mayonnaise with eggs, mayonnaise with potatoes,” he told Calvin Trillin, a regular customer, in 2002, when he allowed Trillin to write a rare profile of him, in The New Yorker. “The key was that essentially you sold mayonnaise for eight dollars a pound and everything else you threw in for free.”

In the early 1980s, when a rent increase made staying in business as a grocery alone untenable, Shopsin converted the space into a 34-seat restaurant, and those sandwiches and other items became a menu. Eve did the waitressing, and Kenny, a self-taught cook, made the food; the menu gradually grew with the restaurant’s popularity.

“Like the grocery before it, their restaurant was really a neighborhood hub,” Lampert said by email. “Back in the day Kenny knew all his customers by name, and it was an eclectic assortment of everyday people, actors, artists, local business owners and neighborhood families.”

The Shopsins’ growing family was often in evidence in the grocery and the restaurant, their five children hanging out there and, as they grew older, working there. Customers knew to expect disorder and boisterousness, at least if they were granted the privilege of being allowed to become restaurant regulars. Legends grew up around “the rules,” violations of which would supposedly get a prospective diner shown the door, although Shopsin maintained that there were fewer of those prohibitions active at any given time than people realized.

There was, for instance, the “no copying” rule: i.e. no “I’ll have what she’s having,” to borrow a phrase from a movie filmed at another famed neighborhood restaurant in New York. By his 2002 interview with Trillin, though, Shopsin said that rule had been largely abandoned.

“I realized that the problem was not that they were trying to imitate the other person,” he said of copying customers, “but that they weren’t capable of ordering anything themselves, and it was just unnecessary cruelty to point that out to them.”

If some rules faded away, new ones emerged — like, as the digital age advanced, no cellphone use.

“The whole point of my restaurant is that people interact with one another — whether it’s with the person they came in with or with the waitress or with the party next to them,” Shopsin wrote in his book. “I don’t care who you interact with as long as it’s not with an electronic device.”

Violators? “I kick them out just like I throw out bad food.”

In 2002 the Shopsins moved the restaurant to a larger space on nearby Carmine Street. (A 2004 film, “I Like Killing Flies,” directed by Matt Mahurin, documented the transition.) Then, four years later, Shopsin downsized radically, relocating to the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. The sprawling menu was downsized, too, although, as Peter Meehan wrote in The New York Times in reviewing the new spot in 2007, “it is still a disorienting documentation of Shopsin’s singular brand of kitchen madness.”

Eve Shopsin died in 2003. Shopsin is survived by two daughters, Melinda and Tamara Shopsin; three sons, Charles, Daniel and Zack; and a granddaughter. Melinda, Tamara and Zack Shopsin now run the restaurant. Chefs at high-end restaurants might obsess about their Michelin Guide ratings, customer reviews and such. Not Shopsin.

“Recently I read a posting about Shopsin’s on the internet that said something like, ‘The food isn’t that great and the service sucks!,'” he recalled in his book. “I wanted to write back, ‘And it’s expensive, too!'”

“But I didn’t,” he added, “because then they would have had my email address.”